Toward a website that fills itself in
Abhishek Nayak is the CEO and co-founder of Appsmith, an open-source application builder that companies use to build internal tools and customer-facing websites. He led the evaluation of data providers for a new feature, a website builder that auto-populates company and people information for the user the moment they start. The data had to come from social media and professional profiles, and it had to be fresh. Layout was the easy part. The harder question was whether the data on a finished site was true the moment someone generated it.
Social and professional profiles change constantly, and a website that showed a user's old role or old company would break trust on the first screen. Building it in-house looked like the obvious move for an engineering-led company. The in-house build ran into trouble almost immediately.
We tried to build this ourselves first, but we ran into all sorts of reliability issues as well as data quality issues.
Before Crustdata
Appsmith already paid for ZoomInfo and Clay to run sales automation, so those vendors were the default candidates for the product too. Neither was built for the job. Their data lagged the profiles it was supposed to mirror, and the APIs behind them assumed a sales rep clicking through records at human pace. A product feature works differently. Every user action fires a request, and the answer has to come back current. Even working out whether the vendors could do that was slow, taking multiple rounds and pulling engineers in before anyone knew if the feature would work.
Appsmith evaluated four providers in all, including ZoomInfo, Apollo, and Clay. Only one returned data fresh enough to put on a user's live website.
We needed an API that would work at our velocity and it would have fresh data. That was really important for us because we were dealing with social media pages and data from social media. And for that, we only found one player.
What Appsmith set out to build
The API had to run at product velocity, returning current information on every user action, not on a weekly refresh. It had to be simple enough to integrate quickly, so engineers could ship the feature instead of building and maintaining data pipelines of their own.
What changed using Crustdata
Rather than stitch together a sales vendor and a half-built in-house system, Appsmith replaced both with one live data layer. The website builder now calls Crustdata's Company Enrichment API for 250+ company datapoints and the People Enrichment API for 90+ people datapoints whenever a user creates a site, and every request returns information pulled from social and professional profiles at that moment.
It works because three things line up at once. The data is live on every call, so what lands on the site matches reality when the user hits generate. The API is a direct request and response that matches how Appsmith's engineers already build, with no tickets and no multi-step retrieval. The documentation was clear enough to evaluate, test, and integrate without the drawn-out discovery other vendors required.
The evaluation set the tone. On the first sales call, Crustdata answered every technical question and tested the API live, so Abhishek could hand his engineers a verified path instead of an open-ended trial. The work had been booked as a one-week integration.
This project, because we were planning, it'll take us a week to go live, it actually took our engineer, I think, half a day.
The bottom line
A feature the team had deprioritized because it looked like a week of build time was shipped in under half a day, giving back four and a half engineering days on a single integration. For a startup where every sprint counts, that time went straight back into Appsmith's core product.
The speed changed the vendor math too. After seeing the data quality and the developer experience on the product side, Appsmith started moving its sales automation off ZoomInfo and onto Crustdata as well, so one API now covers both the website builder and the sales stack. Three vendor relationships collapse toward one, and the engineering overhead of maintaining three drops with them.
The website builder now ships with live data out of the box. Users skip the manual copy from a profile, the generated site reflects their current role and company, and the feature earns trust on the first screen instead of losing it to a cached record from weeks ago.
The bet Appsmith made on live data paid off faster than anyone expected. One API replaced two vendors and an abandoned in-house build, shipped in half a day, and became the foundation for both the product and the sales stack.